“This Is All My Own”: On the Encyclopedia of Food Culture of the Middle Urals

The article is a detailed review of the dictionary of dialectal vocabulary “Traditional Food of the Middle Urals” (compiled by V. V. Lipina, Ya. V. Malkova, and K. V. Osipova), which was published in Yekaterinburg in 2026. The publication is seen as a direct continuation of the Ural project on creating ethno-ideographic dictionaries, which was initiated in the late 1980s. The review emphasizes that the dictionary goes beyond being a purely academic reference book, becoming a hybrid publication that combines elements of an encyclopedia of folk cuisine and a cultural studies research work. The author analyzes the key features of the dictionary, including its linguistic and cultural commentary, the inclusion of detailed recipes from specific informants, and the preservation of the dialectal intonation in the illustrative material. Special attention is paid to the fixation of interethnic borrowings (for example, the Turkic word “mahan”), as well as the reconstruction of three fundamental parameters of the Ural cuisine: the method of heat treatment (the Russian oven), the set of basic ingredients, and the variety of baked goods. In the final part, two suggestions are made for future editions: to provide the dictionary with an alphabetical index and to supplement the printed text with QR codes containing audio recordings of live dialectal speech. It is concluded that the reviewed dictionary is an important contribution to the preservation of the region's intangible cultural heritage.